According to the data from the World Health Organization, ten million people around the world were diagnosed with cancer in 2000, and six million died from it. Moreover, statistics indicate that the cancer incidence rate is on the rise around the globe. In the United States, for example, projections indicate that fifty percent of those alive today will be diagnosed with some form of cancer at some point in their lives.
Cancer therapies include radiation, surgery, cytotoxic chemotherapeutic agents, treatments aimed at increasing cancer-specific immune responses, and combinations of such approaches. Recent approaches to cancer therapy have focused on actively harnessing a patient's immune response to target cancer cells using a variety of approaches, including immunization with tumor antigens, inhibition or removal of suppressive/regulatory immune cell populations, and activation of exhausted immune cell populations.